Bandwidth Management

The application of bandwidth management

What is meant by Bandwidth management?

The term Bandwidth Management refers to the procedure of assessing and managing such communications like packets and traffic on a link of network. In order to shun filling up of the link up till the limit that is required or in some cases when the link is being overfilled bandwidth management is required. Apart from this such a situation would cause the congestion of network and a type of performance that is of poor nature.

How is bandwidth management done?

A management of the bandwidth is done by a bandwidth manager by following different types of processes so that it could influence the performance positively. There are different methods employed by a bandwidth manger to manage bandwidth and these include:

Rate limiting or traffic shaping such as:

• Token bucket.
• Leaky bucket.
• TCP rate control: This would include mechanisms of adjusting the window size of the TCP along with managing the pace of ACKs that are being returned to the sender.

At the time of scheduling algorithms like:

• Class-based weighted fair queuing
• Deficit weighted round robin (DWRR)
• Hierarchical Fair Service Curve (HFSC)
• Weighted fair queuing (WFQ)
• Weighted round robin (WRR)

During congestion avoidance several methods are used like:

• RED, WRED: This would minimize the likelihood of a drop in port queue buffer tail. At the same time this would also help in lowering the chance of TCP global synchronization.
• Policing which is a process of marking or dropping the packet in surplus compared to the rate of committed traffic and size of burst.
• Notification about congestion of explicit nature.
• Tuning of the buffer.

Reservation algorithms or protocols for bandwidth like:

• Algorithm of top-nodes
• Resource reservation protocol (RSVP)
• Constraint-based Routing Label Distribution Protocol (CR-LDP)

Tools used for bandwidth management

Bandwidth management is done with the help of different software tools that are available for the measuring the network traffic. There are some bandwidth management tools that specialize in measuring the traffic by the use of sniffing. While in some other cases the network bandwidth management is done with the use of such tools like WMI, SNMP and different other tools from local agents so that the bandwidth usage on separate routers and machines could be adequately measured.

What are the characteristics and functioning methods of the tools for bandwidth management?

The operation and attributes of tools used for bandwidth management.

• It acts as a user interface for web, graphical application and console.
• It is used to measure real-time traffic graphs.
• Used for the purpose of bandwidth quotas.
• Adequate support is given for the shaping of traffic or limiting the rate. This is done mainly when an overlapping takes place with that of the network traffic control page.
• Bandwidth management helps in supporting the blockage of website and filtering the content.
• It gives warning to inform the administrator about disproportionate usage by various IP address or usage in totality.
• Reporting about network activity is frequently done in opposition to rules for pre-configured traffic matching to illustrate about:
  • Remote IP address
  • Local IP address
  • Protocol or port number
  • Logged in user name